Personal style affects handling? Shouldn’t it be the other way around – adjust your riding technique to take advantage of handling? It’s just like in relationships - figuring out what makes each bike tick is a big part of the fun.
If you own a bike, learn to ride it in a way that will make it handle well. If you're buying a bike, buy the bike that best meets your riding style.
A person who rides a sport bike with their chest up and their arms locked at the elbows is neither riding his bike properly, nor riding the proper bike.
I like to use an upright straight body position on my street bikes, and a low hanging position on my sport bikes. I buy standard ergonomics for the street and sport ergonomics for the track. If I rode a sport bike on the street with my riding style, the handling would be shit. The reverse is also true.
What kind of roads and conditions? Yes we can thin slice this topic and have best handling bike in each sub-category, but I’m thinking all-arounders. It should not be excellent on smooth roads and awful on rough roads, or vice versa. It should be very good (although may not be the best) on all roads and conditions. That’s the philosophy behind Ducati’s Multistrada – good for all roads! To me the BMW GS boxers are top contenders among the best handling street bikes.
If you ride a mix of street and dirt, a strada or GS will be the best handling bike. If you only ride your bike on the track, the 'strada and the GS will not be the best handling bike.
If you stick to super technical back-roads, a 'tard is probably going to be the best handling bike. If you spend most of your time on Skaggs springs raceway dragging knee, the Motard is going to be a crap handling bike.
Usually, it's best to buy the bike that's a good fit to the kind of riding you prefer to do. If 90% of your riding is on the dirt and 10% is on the road, a dual sport is the best handling choice. It's worth it to suffer with crap road handling because it excells so well in the dirt. Buying a 'strada or a GS would leave you sacrificing a lot of handling for that street improvement.
always curious about the part of the handling equation that's NOT suspension related - things like center or gravity, mass centralization, polar moment of inertia, frame/swing arm geometry and stiffness, etc. I’d like to think premium bikes have premium "bone structure”, to take maximum advantage of premium suspension components. Another way of thinking of this – how much of handling comes from good “bone structure”, and how much does good suspension masks not-so-great “bone structure”?
Many thinks the FZ-09 is only a set of good suspension away from being great. Is slapping on a set of premium suspension always a sure-bet fix on handling?
Frame geometry and ergonomics play a huge role in handling. The right tires and suspension are important, but are not the only factors. A Ninja 250 will never handle like a RC390. The geometry, frame design, and ergonomics are not right, and while they can be improved, it wouldn't be practical to fix them.
This is where subjective reviews are so important; they can capture how well the bike works as a whole, rather than as individual pieces. Often, the whole package is far more important than any individual component.
My only issue with bike reviews is that they usually review the bike as delivered. I'd be just as interested in reviews of bikes that have been appropriately modified. E.g. a review on an improperly sprung bike is not really valid to me. Sure lots of people ride their bikes that way, but there really is no excuse for ignoring a $200 fix on a $15000 bike.
Plus Racetec suspension internals for rough roads, and Decades of mountain dirt trail riding, and Desert Racing, to "polish" the rider.
